Delivered by Joshua Israel at Temple Emanuel July 14, 2000
My father and I went hiking together just about every year since I was in high school. Some years it would be just the two of us, and some years my brother David would come too. When we first begin doing this, more than 15 years ago, we used to stay in our own tent that we would carry up, but as my father got older, we gradually shifted from tents to staying in lean-tos, then log shelters, and finally to the comfort of the huts that the Appalachian Mountain Club runs on some of the ranges in the White Mountains. With these huts, you get to the top of a peak and find blankets and a hot meal waiting for you.
My father and I left three days ago for our annual hike. On our second day, two days ago, we had had a long, but good, day. We had made it most of the way up Mount Lafayette on the edge of the beautiful Pemigwaset wilderness, and we pulled into the Appalachian Mountain Club hut there for a meal. We were enjoying our dinner together, and he was looked comfortable and content. Just before dessert was to be served, my father suddenly slumped forward in his seat and died.
Halfway through our hike on the day that he died, I thought my father might have looked a little tired, and I suggested that perhaps we should turn around and take an easier route to a different hut, but he didn't want to. He said that he was doing fine and that besides, we had already made reservations at this particular hut. I said to him: "If something happens to you, do you want people to say `He kept on going because he didn't want to lose his hut reservation?" And he replied, "I think that if something happened, they'd say: `he did it because that's who he was.'"
I can say that he died peacefully in a beautiful place and I can say that he probably died proud, not just proud of the determined recovery he had made from a car accident this past winter, but proud of living his life as he always had - making his own choices and choosing his own path. But these things will never be any real consolation to us for the 20 years more that my father should have been with us, sharing his unique mix of stubbornness, humor, wisdom, cynicism, and especially love - a love of life, a love of his family and a love of his community.
I don't know what comes after this life. I don't know whether my father is already in the olam habah, the world to come, listening to us all, amused by all the fuss, or whether he is instead moving through the great cycle of life, from life to death to compost and then back again, with my father taking particular pleasure, no doubt, as compost. But either way, I hope that he left this life knowing how deeply his family loved him, and how much we will miss him. Goodbye Abba. Baruch dayan emet.
Joshua Israel. 11 Tammuz 5760.